I know we fight a lot. You know I report a lot of abuse and harassment, and you do nothing about the Nazis, and we have our differences. But this isn’t about that. I mean, yeah, I’m salty about the Russian thing, but we need to talk about something else.
We need to talk about using Twitter on a desktop when you have multiple accounts.
Multiple Twitter Accounts Happen
I have a legit reason to have multiple accounts. A good one, in fact. I have my personal account, but I have two others for brands I manage. And that means I kind of need to be able to log in to all three at once and wrangle things.
If you use Twitter on the web, your choices are regular Twitter or Tweetdeck. The latter makes you sign up via a very convoluted process in order to grant access to accounts. Basically, you have to give your ‘main’ account access to the ones you want to manage. It’s not very obvious.
And there are weird things missing from Tweetdeck. Like … no decent notifications. You can’t tell what you’ve read or when people @ you or anything like that. Not easily. Oh, and there’s no GIF button.
Finally … with three accounts I get to have NINE columns. Three each for ‘home,’ ‘mentions,’ and ‘messages.’ Thanks. A lot.
No Great Desktop App
Here’s my problem. There’s no good Twitter desktop app. Your own app went unloved until you pulled the plug. In a tweet. Nice. Really nice. That leaves me with a few choices.
TweetBot: I like Tweetbot, except that I can’t see polls in it, and I can’t navigate to embed Gifs. But it has a pretty decent interface. The biggest issue is that you can’t see group DMs. Sometimes keep on top breaks. Sometimes not.
Twitterific: This is a wonderful app except that scrolling sucks. If you switch to a different account, keep on top stops working, and ⌘↑ (which should take you to the top of whatever you’re on) doesn’t scroll right. Oh and no embedding Gifs. And again, no group DMs and no polls.
What about TweetDeck’s desktop app? It hasn’t been updated since 2015. The best version I’ve seen is Tweeten but again, I’m back to 3 columns per account.
What I Want Is Simple
I want the iOS app, but for the desktop. I want to have the following features:
Multiple Account Support
One visual ‘column’ per account (it can have sub tabs, whatever)
The ability to insert and read polls
Support for multi-person DMs
Notifications
A damn GIF button
Instead, I get to use Tweetdeck in my browser. At least, until Twitter dumps that too.
Hi, Slack. You’re the cool product everyone uses to communicate on scale. You’ve introduced a lot of features and aspects that are great. We all like to use you for our non-company work, but I’ve noticed something interesting.
See. You constantly remind us that Slack is for Business. But you don’t seem to have actually spent enough time in corporate land to understand what that means. So, as someone who worked for nearly 15 years (and recently at that) with The Man, and the last five with a smaller company, let me try to explain to you what mistakes you’re making. Oh, and before anyone asks, yes, I’ve pitched all of this in tickets/suggestions to Slack already.
Constant Barrage
Being able to tune alerts on Slack is basically the only way you have to live or die. I can mute channels or group-chats pretty easily, to allow a conversation I need to be aware of, but not right now to carry on around me.
What I can’t do is mute my really, really, really chatty and annoying coworker for an hour so I can get work done.
Oh sure, Slack, it’s passive aggressive to just mute Bob over there who knows I love the Cleveland Problematically Named Baseball Team, and wants to tell me something I will care about in an hour or so. But right now? I have a job. And I want to concentrate without your alerts popping up on my screen and showing that dreaded unread icon. And yes, Slack, I could mute everything, but what about my coworker Jane, the nice one who pings me with an apology because she knows I’m super busy, but she has a critical work problem, and I’m the expert.
Come on, Slack.
Asynchronicity vs Work/Life
While everyone in startup land likes to brag about how they work 80 hours a week, the reality is that most business aren’t actually that stupid. We take vacations. We don’t work weekends. We like to spend time with family, go to a sports game, and not be distracted by the ping of work.
While you have do not disturb settings, Slack, I can only set them for specific hours. So yes, I do set them for 4pm to 7am, because I actually do have an end of day. But I can’t set my work days, I can’t connect Slack to (say) my Google Calendar and have it automatically detect that I’m out of the office. I have to constantly fiddle and tweak things. It’s a mess.
Out of Office Messages
Speaking of this, if I (perchance) happen to forget to mark myself as out of the office, I’m going to get alerts. Fine, that’s on me. But. You introduced custom status messages, which you tout I can use to announce I’m on vacation. Awesome! Now can you make them useful?
See the problem is I put in “Out of the office until Feb 20” pretty recently, and I thought “My coworkers are intelligent, they’ll see this message and know ‘Aha! Mika is out!’ They don’t. And looking at this, I can’t blame them becuase of two things:
Readability on MacOS is shit
The message doesn’t fully show on iOS
Don’t believe me? Here:
Slack Example from iOSSlack example from MacOS
Those are hard to read! And why don’t they auto-alert like a DND message does when someone DMs me? “Mika is currently [status message]” — Oh yes, Slack, I know people like to use those for jokes. Want to stop them? Make them auto-reply. Then people would only use them for real.
And by the way…
You’re Ageist
Let me tell you a story.
Once upon a time, not very long ago either, I supported desktop software. I received a phone call from someone in the Big Building, aka where the real bankers worked, and she couldn’t use a product because the screen was unreadable. She couldn’t see the buttons or dropdown. I asked her to give me 30 minutes and I would call her back. Quickly I went through a few steps to size and resize the window, and I couldn’t figure it out. I called her back and asked if I could come to her office.
One 20 minute bus ride later, I’m at the fancy building, going through metal detectors, and I head up to her floor. I apologize for not being in a suit and ask her to please show me her desktop. One glance and I realized the problem was that her desktop itself had been resized. I explained I was going to change the resolution, resize it, and see if that fixed it. I promised I would reset everything.
Nervous, she allowed this. After all, if I closed a specific window, I could cost the company a hefty bit of money. I very cautiously (without minimizing anything), changed the resolution.
“Oh, that’s how it was this morning! My coworker was using my workstation.”
After I head-desked a few times, I checked the app I was responsible for. It was set to take up most of the screen but not all. I resized it, manually, and then restored her preferred resolution. I then wrote down how I did that, how to fix it in the future, and went to give her coworker a stern word that began with “The first rule of using someone else’s workstation is THOU SHALT NOT MESS WITH THEIR SETTINGS.”
A few years later, when I no longer worked on that team, I got a phone call from her again. “My new coworker is having the weird screen problem I had a million years ago. Can we pay you with lunch to fix it again?”
Of course I said yes.
Now re-read those problems I have with you, Slack. Because you’re worse.
To Review
I look at Slack, and I look at the problems I have, and I think “If I wasn’t technically competent, I would be lost.” And I realized “I am technically competent and I still get lost.”
Slack. If you want to make it bigger, if you want big companies and banks to start using you instead of Lotus Notes Messenger, you need to step up your game. Provide business tools, the ones they need to make sure if they’re not available, someone knows who to contact next. Treat people like grown ups with mortgages, not 20-somethings who exist on packing peanuts and internships.
Basically, Slack, you want the grown ups? Grow up.
After you think about where you’re saving your data, internally or externally, you’re going to be faced with the biggest problem known to exist.
What do you do with your data?
Common Data is (Mostly) Obvious
Some data, as I’ve said before, is obvious. That is, you know what you want to do with statistics of visits. The base outset is ‘figure out how many people visit my site.’ Right? Not too hard. But that isn’t all you want to know. You want to know when your site is busiest, what content people read, and maybe you want to know on what device.
You want to know these things because they can help you optimize what you do next. If, for example, your Monday posts are super popular, then you want to make sure you post them at the time the most people are going to visit your site. If you know only 2 people view your site on an iPad, maybe fixing that little annoyance can wait a bit.
Rare Data is A Headache
On the other hand, when you look at statistics for your complex data, like a site with TV shows and characters and actors, you have a completely different problem. What public stats are both relevant and meaningful? And how do you represent them in ways that people can understand?
Like, do you use piecharts?
They can be helpful but only if you don’t have a large number of data slices.
I made a pie chart with 28 slices and it was unreadable. Though that was mostly because everyone had between 1-5% except for one that had 75%.
The Question Is Usage
This is a problematic question because it has no easily defined answer before you start building out your site. We’ve all seen an image of a paved path and then a foot-trail cutting away from it, or winding around an obstacle. People like to joke about how it’s design vs usage. While our goal when making any product is to avoid people walking off the paths, it’s unavoidable. And in the case of public statistics, it’s even harder to predict usage.
A large reason for the problem is what is called a failure of imagination. This is, in part, the fault of the designers. That is, they didn’t predict things properly. Which requires metrics. Which can’t be gathered until people have used the site a little.
You see the problem, I hope.
Start With The Easy
When I built out stats on my site, the ones I wanted people to use, I made sure to start with some easy things. Like those pie charts. Those are just pulled from a custom taxonomy which every character has. They’re simple. They’re easy. And they let people visualize.
After I released it, someone asked “Could we have a chart to show how many actors a character has?”
That was actually not easy, but the point is that by starting with something ‘easy’ I was able to inspire people to ask what they wanted to see.
Don’t Be Afraid to Be Wrong
Remember I mentioned that evil pie chart? You’re going to be wrong. You’re going to assume that the best way to show a specific data point is a pie chart when it really should be a bar chart. If you pick the right chart systems, it shouldn’t be too horrible to switch between them. But sometimes it will be.
Just remember, it’s okay to make mistakes. You can dig up a path and repave it after all.
The very idea of ‘I should make statistics’ or ‘what are the metrics of this’ starts from the same place. We have a desire to understand what a thing is. Statistics, like traffic, and metrics, like speed, can tell us obviously important information about our sites. Faster sites do better. More traffic gets you more… whatever.
But those are the obvious things. There are easy to understand numbers and there are difficult to process numbers. And it all matters where you save the data.
Getting At The Data
When I set about making statistics for LezWatchTV, the biggest problem I faced was determining what I wanted to show. Some things were simple. How many characters died and what percent of all characters was that? How many shows have dead characters?
Since I chose to use WordPress features, like custom taxonomies, for the majority of the aspects of the site, getting those numbers was simple. There were, of course, some that were very difficult to get at, and this is fully of my own design. Sometimes there will be data you want to use that is just harder to get at than others.
This means the question of understanding your numbers begins with understanding where they belong.
Save Data in Smart Places
I say this over and over. Use WordPress’ native features first.
I mean use the taxonomies and the custom post types and the post meta wisely. But. When you’ve got a lot of data that needs to be cross related, consider saving it someplace else. For example, the reason FacetWP is so damn fast is that it doesn’t query WordPress all the time, and instead uses it’s own tables.
Having it’s own table means there’s less overhead as they can make direct SQL calls to pull the data. When you have data spread across three post types, this becomes pretty much an imperative. You just have to script the code to save it properly.
External Data
While FacetWP does save data to it’s own tables, there is another option, and that is external locations. You’re most familiar with this with regards to Google Analytics. Some data makes sense to keep local, but keep in mind what you’re doing and what you’re generating with the data. When it’s just posts, local is perfectly logical. When you get into statistics… Well. Maybe you should export it.
That brings up the next question. What data to you export, and to where.
In this example, I have a very specific default image I use – the mystery person – to indicate the post doesn’t have it’s own image yet. I went and found the image in my media library and took note of the value – 949. Then I added a meta query which said “If the _thumbnail_id does not equal 949.”
We also have a standard convention for when we have a pending data post, but we need it for statistical reasons. Since, as of WP 4.4, you can use negatives in searches, just add this to the basic query:
's' => '-TBD',
This could be useful for your stores, if you wanted to list a product of the day but perhaps not ones with “Coming Soon” in the description. Of course, you should also have some meta flag but you get the idea.
Posts With One of Two Values
Okay. Here’s fun. Let’s say you have a post meta field called example_site_group and there are six choices in it but you only want one and two. Well, for that you need to use an array and a LIKE:
We have our data in a properly consumable array. It’s formatted the way we need. Now we just need to script the java.
Take a deep breath.
What We Want
What we want is simple. A stacked bar chart that shows the values of all possible permutations. It looks like this:
A stacked chart
That shows how many characters there are per gender orientation, and stacks it for a total count (which is why we needed that count you see).
Send In The Clowns
Since I’m already using Chart.js, I just need to have a function to output the javascript. But. Since I also have to loop through the arrays to get the collective data, I need a bit of PHP:
/*
* Statistics Display Barcharts
*
* Output the list of data usually from functions like self::meta_array
* It loops through the arrays and outputs data as needed
*
* This relies on ChartJS existing
*
* @param string $subject The content subject (shows, characters)
* @param string $data The data - used to generate the URLs
* @param array $array The array of data
*
* @return Content
*/
static function stacked_barcharts( $subject, $data, $array ) {
// Defaults
$data = ( $data == 'nations' )? 'nations' : substr( $data, 8 );
$title = ucfirst( substr($subject, 0, -1) ) . ' ' . ucfirst( $data );
$height = '550';
// Define our settings
switch ( $data ) {
case 'gender':
case 'sexuality':
case 'romantic':
$title = 'Character per Nation by ' . ucfirst( $data );
$datasets = array();
$terms = get_terms( 'lez_' . $data, array( 'orderby' => 'count', 'order' => 'DESC', 'hide_empty' => 0 ) );
if ( ! empty( $terms ) && ! is_wp_error( $terms ) ) {
foreach ( $terms as $term ) $datasets[] = $term->slug;
}
$counter = 'characters';
$height = '400';
break;
}
?>
<h3><?php echo $title; ?></h3>
<div id="container" style="width: 100%;">
<canvas id="barStacked<?php echo ucfirst( $subject ) . ucfirst( $data ); ?>" width="700" height="<?php echo $height; ?>"></canvas>
</div>
<script>
// Defaults
Chart.defaults.global.responsive = true;
Chart.defaults.global.legend.display = false;
// Bar Chart
var barStacked<?php echo ucfirst( $subject ) . ucfirst( $data ); ?>Data = {
labels : [
<?php
foreach ( $array as $item ) {
if ( $item[$counter] !== 0 ) {
$name = esc_html( $item['name'] );
}
echo '"'. $name .' ('.$item[$counter].')", ';
}
?>
],
datasets: [
<?php
foreach ( $datasets as $label ) {
$color = ( $label == 'undefined' )? 'nundefined' : str_replace( ["-", "–","-"], "", $label );
?>
{
borderWidth: 1,
backgroundColor: window.chartColors.<?php echo $color; ?>,
label: '<?php echo ucfirst( $label ); ?>',
stack: 'Stack',
data : [<?php
foreach ( $array as $item ) {
echo $item[ 'dataset' ][ $label ] . ',';
}
?>],
},
<?php
}
?>
]
};
var ctx = document.getElementById("barStacked<?php echo ucfirst( $subject ) . ucfirst( $data ); ?>").getContext("2d");
var barStacked<?php echo ucfirst( $subject ) . ucfirst( $data ); ?> = new Chart(ctx, {
type: 'horizontalBar',
data: barStacked<?php echo ucfirst( $subject ) . ucfirst( $data ); ?>Data,
options: {
scales: {
xAxes: [{ stacked: true }],
yAxes: [{ stacked: true }]
},
tooltips: {
mode: 'index',
intersect: false
},
}
});
</script>
<?php
}
Contains information related to marketing campaigns of the user. These are shared with Google AdWords / Google Ads when the Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts are linked together.
90 days
__utmx
Used to determine whether a user is included in an A / B or Multivariate test.
18 months
_gali
Used by Google Analytics to determine which links on a page are being clicked
30 seconds
_ga_
ID used to identify users
2 years
_ga
Used to distinguish users.
2 years
_gat
Used to throttle request rate.
1 minute
_gid
Used to distinguish users.
24 hours
__utma
Used to distinguish users.
Persistent
__utmb
Used to determine new sessions/visits.
30 minutes
__utmc
Used to determine if the user is in a new session/visit.
Session
__utmt
Used to throttle request rate.
10 minutes
__utmv
Used to store visitor-level custom variable data.
2 years
__utmz
Stores the traffic source or campaign that explains how the user reached your site.
